The ADPSFC data includes SYNOP, METAR, AWOS, and ASOS land report types. The SFCSHP data includes moving ship, fixed ship, MARS (moving and fixed) and buoy (moored and drifting) marine report types. Reports number in the thousands. Note: Ship data has been stripped from all BUFR files ranging from Dec 12, 2007 to the present. Users can find near-realtime ship data in NCEP's PREPBUFR data DS337.0. Long term ship data can be found in the ICOADS dataset DS540.0.

This dataset is maintained in NCEP BUFR format, and updated weekly by DSS using files prepared by NCEP. Software which extracts data from the BUFR file, and places it into a basic text file, can be found in BUFRdecode_ADPsfc.tar . Data archived within this dataset spans the period from April 2000 to near current. DS464.0 provides the same data from 1973 to 2007 in NMC Office Note 29 (ON29) format. BUFR format reports contain additional information that is not carried over to ON29 format, including the the original raw GTS string reports. Similar data produced at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) from a USAF binary set (DATSAV2) is available in ds463.2, covering the period from 1901 to near current.

NCEP uses Automated Data Processing (ADP) to decode and reformat the GTS reports. The NCEP document Observational Data Processing at NCEP and the NCAR document TN404 An Introduction to Atmospheric and Oceanographic Datasets, (chapter 3) discuss the collection of this data in greater detail.

DSS has collected for users a variety of important usage details.